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There had to be someone to save, Phantom thought, his eyes ablaze. He rubbed his palms against his thighs, feeling the slippery material through the tears in his gloves. His fingers stung as dirt smeared into the micro-cuts on his skin, but he could hardly feel it through the hurricane that was in his mind.
Please, let there be someone to save.
“Phantom?” a voice said, but it sounded confused, not in distress. Therefore none of his concern.
He pushed forward blindly, stumbling over loose rubble. He caught his balance on a boulder of fallen concrete and gasped for breath despite the fact that he hadn’t run. Still, his chest tightened its claw around his lungs and he coughed up the dust, smoke, grime that clung to the air in clouds.
This was his fault.
And now he was paying the ultimate price.
“You should have ended me when you had the chance!” Spectra’s cackling echoed in his mind. He could feel her claws around his throat, hoisting him up higher and higher in the air.
He remembered how much he wanted to scream, to wail her away. But he was weak, and she was not, and he couldn’t do anything else except watch her plan come to fruition.
As he watched the explosions. The fire. The chunks of rubble toss into the air. They were silent. Why were they silent?
And then the booming sounded. It blistered his eardrums, lighting up the sky with fireworks and crackling and the worst sound imaginable.
And then the building tipped over. Falling to the ground. Crumbling under supports that no longer existed.
He was too weak.
“This is your fault, child. You failed them. And now I will feast.”
His fault.
“You couldn’t protect them.”
His fault.
“Delicious!”
His fault.
There had to be someone to save
But he could hardly expand his senses over to the overwhelming despair that fogged the air. Even if there were someone trapped, he would never know. He couldn’t hear them, smell them, see them, feel them.
He had lost.
But he couldn’t give up.
He pushed himself off the used-to-be wall and walked forward. Obsessively, maybe what once had been. But his Obsession was Ruined and he would never be able to rest again. He knew this, not because anyone had ever told him so, but because he could feel it.
He was an Abomination, the other ghosts called him.
He went against the ecto-laws of physics.
He shouldn’t have existed.
When a ghost fundamentally fails at their Obsession, they fracture. But Phantom hadn’t. Because Phantom was a halfa, because he was a mistake, because he was a freak of nature.
What happens when someone who toes the line between dead and living fails at their Obsession?
No halfa ever had. So no one knew. But Phantom knew that he was still here, still dragging his feet along the cracked pavement, broken but still moving like a zombie thirsting for blood.
There had to be someone to save…
He fell onto the ground. The sound of crying was too much, the feeling of death was too much. He had never lost anyone like this before, he had never failed before, and this was too much, too much, too much.
“You should have ended me when you had the chance.”
He should have ended her before when her greatest evil was haunting Casper High. Before she set her sights greater, grander, deadlier. Before she decided to go to these extremes for the sake of her disgusting vanity.
The explosions deafened the world, vibrating every molecule down to his core.
He was going to kill her.
“Phantom!”
He opened his eyes and whipped around. Spectra was gone, and Bertrand too, nothing more than splatters of green on the pavement. She can’t hurt anyone again, but it’s too late. I failed. I didn’t protect them.
“Phantom, come here!” The voice said again, this time more urgently.
Phantom finally locked eyes with the man—a police officer—who was standing by a pile of rubble with a crowd of onlookers.
“Someone’s trapped under there!” the officer shouted.
They…need me?
Trapped…
“Alive?” Phantom croaked, his vocal cords surely bleeding after what he had put them through.
“Yes, someone’s alive! We need you to phase her out!”
His knees nearly buckled right then and there. There had to be someone—there was someone to save.
The force of his core lifted him from the ground, it zipped him forward, it stitched his suit back together and cloaked his shimmering aura back around him. He was weak, so very weak, but there was someone to save and he couldn’t save them looking like a broken excuse for a ghost.
“Where?” he asked.
“Down there.” The officer pointed to a pile of rubble. “Be careful. The rocks are unstable, and we don’t know who else is trapped down there with her.”
Even if he couldn’t see them, he knew his eyes were glowing alight. He lit a low-powered ball of ectoplasm in his fist for light, turned his body intangible, and dove down into the concrete jenga. He passed through a slab leaning on another before coming into a clearing. Broken desktops, tables, and scrambled manila folders greeted his eyes.
“Phantom!” a new voice gasped.
Phantom tried to not turn around too quickly. He forced himself to stay in the air, to take stock of the scene, to see the one conscious woman in a pencil skirt smeared with blood and one unconscious woman slumped against the shattered wall.
“You’re here,” she whispered, her eyes growing shinier against the ecto-light. “You’re here. Oh my god, you’re here. We’re gonna be okay.”
She hunched over the other woman, her tears spilling onto her cheeks.
“It’s going to be okay,” Phantom said.
It was going to be okay. There was someone to save.
“Please, take Marissa first,” the woman said. “She needs an ambulance. Please.”
“I got her.” Phantom flew down, hovering over the duo.
The woman pushed back to reveal her elder friend whose once-white blouse had tie-dyed red.
“She got hit with something. I don’t know what.”
Phantom let the green fizzle away in his fist. The room dimmed but didn’t darken as the white of his aura took over. He fitted his glove over the unconscious woman’s abdomen and lowered his temperature until ecto-ice bubbled at his fingertips. He pressed his glove down, letting the ice latch onto its new host.
The conscious woman didn’t say anything, but Phantom felt the need to explain anyway, “That will stop her bleeding while I move her. Don’t worry, it will be okay. I’ll save you both.”
He wrapped a gentle arm around the older woman, Marissa, and spread his aura over her, switching it to intangibility the moment she was fully covered in white. Slowly, to not jostle her, he flew up the way he had come, passing through slabs of concrete and broken wires until the dust-covered sunlight and cheers from the crowd greeted him once again.
He made quick work of setting her down in front of the officer. “There’s someone else. I’ll be right back.”
He couldn’t have returned underground soon enough.
There are people to save.
“You ready?” Phantom asked.
“Yes.” The younger woman wiped the tears from her eyes and reached out to him, not even pausing to shiver as they finally made contact.
“Let’s get you to safety,” Phantom said.
His aura bathed her body just as it had the older woman before her, and he pulled her up through the concrete the same as well. The crowd cheered, and he tried to not preen like a peacock as he set her down on the uneven ground.
“Thank you,” the woman said. “You saved me.”
His core buzzed with newfound life, and he felt some of the nicks on his hands and skin begin to heal.
“You’re welcome,” he responded, his voice far less grated than before.
The officer put a hand on his shoulder. “Alright, Phantom?”
Perhaps he should have been embarrassed at his previous display of weakness, at the way he had stumbled around this building like a lost lamb searching for its mother. But there was someone to save and he would do it, he would save them all.
He Had To.
“Let’s find the others,” he said, staring determined into the officer’s eyes. “We’ll get everyone.”
The officer handed him a radio. “You search underground. We’ll radio you from above if we find anyone. Be careful.”
“You too.”
The officer nodded once, then turned back to his team. “Alright, you heard him! Let’s find the survivors!”
He had people to save.